[TML] White Dwarfs, Black Holes & 100 Diameters

[Timothy Little]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 12:33:25AM -0500, Jerry W Barrington wrote:
> I've seen several variants where the jump is almost "free", but can
> only happen at specific points.  So you would jump in on *this* side
> of the system, then to continue on, have to work around to *that*
> side.

That would certainly work against the "around the galaxy in 80 days"
problem.  And, of course, provide convenient choke-points for
maintaining a blockade.


> The trouble with all star catalogs is that by the time you get out
> to a decently large size, the error bars on the distance are
> enormous, and the dim stars are vastly under-represented.  :(

It's mainly just the red dwarf stars that are missing, and who cares
about them anyway? ;^)

One reason I like to play a game set within "real space" is that I get
to memorise the relative locations of many nearby stars "for free" by
playing the game.

That leads to the biggest difference between Traveller maps and real
maps:  real star maps are 3D.  That makes a huge difference to the
number of systems within a given distance.  For example, there are
realistically maybe 3,000 systems within 20 parsecs of Sol - about 7
Traveller sectors worth of stars within the distance of about 1.  In a
volume the diameter of the Imperium there are probably near a million.

In terms of a fixed FTL distance travelled per "jump", this also makes
quite a difference in reachability.  In Traveller, jump-1 ships are
limited to specific "mains" routes, jump-2 ships can reach a much
larger area, and jump-3 ships are able to go practically everywhere.
In real space, a jump-1 ship would be useless nearly everywhere, but a
jump-2 ship would typically have more systems reachable within 5 jumps
than even a Traveller jump-3.


- Tim